The Heart Is Exposed Wire
by Jessica Moore
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
The winter is cold, but not as cold as usual, and I spend most of it inside between the barnhouse and my and Simon’s ranch house, subjected constantly to microwaved noodles and steady chatter and the warmth of the furnace. Clarice Clarence comes and goes, twice in fact, but we don’t learn any new information about the robots.
Nellie runs herself over the Hogan Slough, and the town is mostly quiet. Things are what they are. We don’t host any seasonal celebrations, and mostly the winter after the initial panic is a quiet, sleepy affair that leaves me with the disorienting sensation of being at home. At one point, Nuna brings over a sprig of mistletoe and laughs at the high blush of red in Simon’s cheeks.
Winter nights are even colder than winter days, but Simon’s body runs warm and I think that maybe reconciliation does, after all, have something to do with closeness.
In the morning, I ride out still to move the cattle but return as quickly as possible. I delegate more than I should, and I laugh a little at the irony of it all, of the winter that keeps us indoors when indoors is where we want to be, of Simon’s delighted face when for the third consecutive week I have been home in the evening for dinner and mundane conversation.
In the winter we fall into patterns, and I am almost upset by the easiness of it all.
“You should take a trip,” Simon says, days later. “I know you’ve wanted to visit the city, spend some time away.”
I scrub my palm over my eyes, unsure what to do with this new old kindness.
“I might,” I say. “You know Aunt Chris in Red River, she said she’d put me up in the guesthouse for a week if I wanted.”
“You can take the pickup.”
Nodding, I turn back to the television set we bought shortly after the fires. Reruns of the news stream across the quadrangular screen, miscellaneous strangers advising us of the wind, the weather, of traffic and road conditions and county elections. News from the television is strange because every news story breaks over the Internet, we read about it on our phones, read about the community and political responses to it on our phones, read opinion pieces about events minutes after they occur, and then hours later I sit in front of a TV and watch the word BREAKING scroll by like a decorative frieze.
It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, but through the window in the living room between the drawn-back curtains I can see across the street where Mack’s window above Small Bar remains lit, flooding the pavement below it and the group of convivial, late-night loiterers who occupy it in orange light. I know for a fact that Mack is asleep, because Nuna says that no matter how hard he tries, he can never stay awake much past one, even if he reads or watches the news like Simon and I do when the nights are long.
I’ll have to ask him later, I think, why he leaves the light on for so long after the bar officially closes, but for now I watch the news roll by like slow traffic until the sun rises and we’ve wasted both an evening and a morning.
* * *
I don’t manage to make the trip to Red River until early spring. From the driver’s seat of the truck I wave goodbye to Simon and to Mister Zero, shouting “see you in a week” as I shift gears and the truck rambles down the gravel road. In my little oblong side-view mirror, their shapes grow smaller and smaller, and the last thing I see before turning beyond a bend of pines is Simon patting Mister Zero on the head with one hand and waving to me with the other.
Mack is at the gas station when I stop for a fill, funneling gas into a big-rig and leaning against the trailer.
“Long night?” I ask.
“Not really.” Mack shrugs. “Shut the bar down early actually.”
“You always leave that light on,” I say. “As long as I remember you’ve left that light on.”
“So?”
“So doesn’t it bother you at all, going to bed with the light on and listening to people hang out downstairs and shout all night? Don’t you get any sleep?”
“No,” Mack says, then spits at the ground. “I figure people need a place.”
He pats the arms of his canvas coat to free up some of the dust and replaces the gas pump, gives me a half-salute as he wanders back around the tractor and climbs inside.
I finish with the gas and don’t bother with a receipt.
On the long drive to Aunt Chris and Red River I think about the robots. Simon says they don’t feel pain falling over the jumps, that they aren’t remorseful afterward, says they don’t plan things too far in advance or think abstractly, aren’t programmed to do much at all except what we ask them to do.
Clarice Clarence, the tech man from town, made similar remarks. Nobody understands why sweet Ada or Ol’ Dusty or free-wheelin’ McCauley or any of the bots would up and throw themselves over the buffalo jumps, and Simon says nobody should be able to understand unless they can read the programming, because that’s where it’s all at apparently, and everything else is just wild speculation. But everyone who can read the programming is at a loss.
The thought crosses my mind that we might never solve the mystery. We’ve learned to live with robots already. Why can’t we learn to live with innocuous, adrenaline-junkie robots? It’s already started to happen. In the winter, when Nellie ran herself over the Hogan Slough, most of us only shrugged and carried on. The robots are harmless, after all, but there is still, like Nuna said, the practical desire to know.
On either side of the two-lane highway on the way to Red River, grass grows for about a foot and a half, as if the highway itself were a river. And at the end of every off road that leads inevitably to a ranch house, red tractors stand like agricultural wardens.
The drive from our ranch house on the Broken O to Red River lasts about three hours and twists through mountains and great yellow plains without ever passing through another city. The Redwash, whenever the road steers beside or over it, looks just like it did in the summer save for the little five-petaled flowers growing in ribbons of white along its banks.
Small towns like Courby and Black Deer crop up occasionally in the form of wooden buildings coated in flaky paint — a food mart, bar, schoolhouse — and fall away again in the span of thirty seconds.
I call Aunt Chris while passing through one of these small towns to let her know I am an hour’s drive away from Red River and that I will be stopping in the next town for iced tea and groceries and to ask if she wants me to pick anything up for her — she doesn’t — and sometime after we hang up I pull off the uneven road into a parking lot out front of a general store. The Mountain Goat, it’s called, which seems creative but is more fortuitous. The way we name places out here, in Big Sky Country and the surrounding towns, is by throwing stones into the brush and seeing which animal comes darting out of it. If we don’t see any animals, the joke goes, we name the place after the brush.
Inside I buy iced tea — the kind Simon likes, not the kind I usually drink — and corn nuts and a few breakfast items, and the woman behind the counter bags my items for me quickly and with little eye contact.
I pile the bags into the back seat of the truck and close the door. In my line of sight previously blocked by the open door, a small boy has fallen to the pavement. He clutches his knee, crosshatched with the stubble of dark asphalt. A woman rounds the blue buggy she has just finished parking and bends over him, brushing away the stubble, speaking soft words, making a fuss until he is smiling, injury long forgotten.
As I turn back toward the truck, I consider calling Simon. But I pause, startled as the boy falls a second time.
It takes his mother a minute to understand the game. When at last she does, she laughs, turning again toward the store to hide the sound as the boy runs — now sheepish — to catch up with her, but I hear the laughter as it carries across the parking lot, bright and reverberant, clinking like river stones.
And, suddenly, I know. Wild speculation, Simon will say. Programming and self-interest and all that. But I know.
The remainder of the drive into Red River seems to take no time at all. Aunt Chris appears on the doorstep of her bunkhouse in overalls and work boots and declares how happy she is to see me. She asks about Simon, and I tell her over a plateful of pesto spaghetti about the robots and the buffalo jumps and the town. And telling about them makes me laugh, even as Aunt Chris looks sideways at me as if I’ve gone a little crazy. Spring is for beginnings, always, and as Mack would say if I ever dared complain about the liquor or food service at his bar — the only one in all of Riverfork — “You can’t do nothing about it.”
A week later, when I return to Riverfork and to the Broken O and to the robots, I find Simon stretched out along our lumpy couch cushions, eyes closed, breaths even, the local news still repeating itself quietly, ad infinitum, on our television. A spring breeze brushes the curtains aside and Mack’s orange light above Small Bar, visible through the living room window, remains on. I pull a worn throw blanket over Simon’s body and think only: what a strange and illuminating thing is care.
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Moore
